Report ID 2135946027: Installation on new computer not syncing correctly

james.k.russell · April 23, 2015

By preference, I rely primarily on Zotero standalone.
Formerly I had a smallish library under login jameskrussell, and a much larger one under james.k.russell. On my main desktop, I unified these a few months ago, keeping ames.k.russell as the active login. I just brought up a new installation on a new laptop (MacBook Pro). Somehow, perhaps from keychain?, it took the old login for the small library (jameskrussell), and populated it with that library (which I had abandoned). I quit Zotero, synced old desktop to server, then started Zotero again on the laptop and tried to sync. It notified me of pending conflicts and the change in login, then presented 100 conflicts for which I accepted the offered merged records. Then, it hit this wall. The library on the laptop remains small.
I want to populate the library on the standalone instance on the laptop with the large library. The old smaller library can be abandoned.
After prepping these notes, I returned to error message, clicked Continue (I think), and it alerted me to 66 more conflicts, for which I again accepted the proposed merge (I always do - I wish you'd let me set that as a default so I didn't have to click dozens of times). Then it returned to processing records from the server, and soon finished with still a small library (~2200 items; larger library has > 14500).

dstillman · April 23, 2015

Assuming you have all the data you want online under this account, just make sure you have this account entered into the prefs, close Zotero, delete zotero.sqlite and 'storage' in your Zotero data directory, reopen Zotero, and sync. It will pull down your entire server library. (You can also use Restore from Zotero Server in the prefs, but that might leave some unwanted orphaned files in the 'storage' directory.)

I again accepted the proposed merge (I always do - I wish you'd let me set that as a default so I didn't have to click dozens of times)

This is implemented for the next version, actually — but there's no reason for you to have any conflicts here.

james.k.russell · April 23, 2015

Thanks for the helpful response. Actually, it seems to have mended itself overnight. I guess I just needed some patience, but it was not apparent that it was making progress. Anyway, all good now.

I look forward to the new merge functionality.